A common legal task for lawyers and other legal professionals entails drafting, analyzing, and/or negotiating transactional documents, such as legal contracts. Unlike caselaw documents, which include citations to other legal cases, that can inform lawyers about the validity, reliability, and origins of the legal text and reasoning within a given judicial opinion, contracts typically lack such indicators. Nevertheless, lawyers and other legal professionals often seek information about the precedential value and the reliability of contract (deal) documents, particularly clauses, definitions, and key phrases within these documents.
Accordingly, the present inventors identified a need for better tools to help lawyers and other legal professionals work with and analyze phrases and clauses within transactional documents.